We should celebrate, in our very British manner, this victory over a societal problem:

You may have seen a BBC News story that reported that half of Britons hold ‘authoritarian populist’ views, perhaps a prelude to the rise of a British Donald Trump. It was covered on the Today Programme and given a long, uncritical article on the BBC News website.

But the paper wasn't very good.

There're most certainly possible arguments to make against the Private Finance Initiative: there's more than a suspicion that it was used to allow large amounts of spending without having to trouble the government books with it for example. And yet there's still an obvious value to it:

Every time we mention climate change we get a certain amount of stick from people who insist that it's not a thing, or that catastrophic isn't, or that the temperature numbers have been fiddled and so on. All of which rather means that we've not managed to get across our point and why, thus, we argue for a carbon tax.

A quite lovely little piece about that trend for people trying to be self-sufficient in the 60s and 70s. Quite why people thought they should do this we think we know. Nostalgia really, coupled with very rose tinted glasses. The people who actually had, properly, lived as peasants fled for the cities as soon as they could scrape up the three groats to do so.